IMHO, GitHub has been steadily getting worse ever since Microsoft bought it.
The first things I noticed were minor UI annoyances. Later on, it started hijacking some of my browser's keyboard shortcuts and controls. Then there was the continual nagging: to give them more email addresses, to re-re-re-re-download my TOTP recovery keys, etc. Unilaterally deciding to use all of our creative works to train their LLM hasn't made them many friends. And now there's this issue, which might not be Microsoft's fault (at least not entirely), but it is a consequence of the global software community using a single, centralised service for so much of what we do.
I put my most recently published project on Codeberg. If it goes well, I'll probably move my GitHub projects there. The UI is familiar and comfortable, and I think their work toward federated software forges is important.
It's worth noting that Codeberg requires most projects to be open-source. I think they make exceptions in some cases.
Once these things are federated, it seems reasonable to expect that each instance would be able to choose what stars/followers/etc it accepts or displays, roughly similar to what Lemmy does with allowed/blocked instances. That might put a dent in the problem. At least, there would no longer be a single, easy, high-value target for this sort of thing.